Tror Na Foe (To Return and Find Again)

The continuing saga of how one family, separated by slavery for over two hundred and fifty years, is reclaiming itself from the great transatlantic lost and found.

Friday, September 26, 2008

photo: members of the Tovie clan gather to meet the author under an ancient man-go tree at the old Agbemabiese family compound in Tegbi, Ghana.

Woezor (welcome)! If this is your first visit, I invite you to scroll all the way back to the very beginning to see how this journey began and where it has led us thus far. This is the fourth of six installments of a chapter called, "I Would Know You by Your Feet." Please come back and visit again soon.-----------------------------------------------------------------

I had already forwarded one specific question to them in advance, through Lawrence, that I’d hoped someone might be able to answer, something which had emerged from the historical research I’d done about Anlo before coming. I’d learned that between 1688 and 1704 there had been a cultural upheaval in Anlo which, at its core, was about religion. The Ewes had for most of their history lived as a confederation of villages whose livelihood was farming and fishing. Ewes who lived in the population centers of West Africa’s great empires were known for their abilities as craftspeople and traders. The Ewes placed a high premium on peaceful relations with their neighbors, and over the centuries, when attacked, their response was to migrate to new territories where they felt safer.

But in the early 1680s, just as the slave trade was gathering momentum, they had arrived in Anlo with their backs to the sea. The marauding Ashanti, Ada, Akwapim and others pressed them on their west, while Oyo pressed them from the north and east. Tired of being relatively easy pickings for slave raiders, and with nowhere left to run, the loosely confederated Ewe military organized and centralized its command in order to more effectively defend themselves. By the mid-1680s, they had not only beaten their enemies back, but in the east, had begun to turn the table on their old Yoruba enemies, and were capturing and selling them as slaves. The generals in this new militaristic culture became the most powerful element of society, and with them, the God of war. For a time, forsaking the worship of the old agricultural Gods and joining the generals in worshipping the God of war was necessary for ambitious people who wanted to advance their family’s position and fortune. After a while, this switching of religious allegiances became mandatory. Some refused to buckle under. What happened to them? So far, I haven’t come across any accounts of the consequences they paid. Were some killed? Were some sold into slavery? Is that what happened to my ancestor? Was he one of those who resisted? Was being sold away his punishment? If so, I thought, then I might well be sitting now with the descen-dants of some of the kin who sold him away.

But no one among the people in the courtyard could shed any light on this for me either. They’d have to get back to me on this question as well.

In the meantime, the elders who’d gathered to meet me made it clear they would do their best to tell me as much as they knew. And so, everyone took their seats, Mr. Dzisam made introductions all around, and the formal part of our meeting began. There were twenty four of us in the courtyard now, including the children. Kwaku was sent out to the Groovy Spot to buy soft drinks. These would be refreshment for the women and children. Only the men would be passing around the schnapps after the opening libations.

As soon as Kwaku returned, Kwadzo, aided by Eric, performed a libation ceremony with one of the bottles of flavored shnapps Gideon and I had bought in Woe for the occasion, asking the ancestors to enjoy this auspicious moment with us and to bless it. Eric scooped a little dirt from the courtyard into a bowl and swirled some water into it. Kwadzo poured in some of the schnapps and swirled the mixture again. Whether they had planned it before-hand as a group, or it was a spontaneous expression from Kwadzo’s heart – or perhaps a whispered inspiration from the ancestors themselves – an attempt to begin to bring our differing narratives together began now with this libation. As Kwadzo chanted prayers, pausing periodically to pour some of the mixture upon the ground, Gideon leaned into me and whispered an interpretation of his words. He offered thanks that one who had been lost to them had returned, and asked the ancestors to bear joyful witness to this. But he also invited my ancestors to come and be with us, to bless and to be blessed on this occasion. In the distant past, my ancestors the ancestors of the people gathered here were one and the same, but tradition holds that the ancestors’ presence is strongest in the places where their lives were lived on earth. So mine, who were among the many ancestors torn from their midst long ago and made to live out their lives on foreign soil, were asked to come join us too. And then for the entire assembly, seen and unseen, Kwadzo asked that there be healing for those who had been hurt by slavery, and forgiveness for those who had been involved in the cycle of capturing and selling which fueled the trade.

As Eric and Kwadzo closed the ceremony and returned to the circle, the women and some of the other men spontaneously offered up additional prayers of thanksgiving. Then, while Kwaku handed out soft drinks to the women and children, the men passed the bottle of schnapps, each reverentially pouring a little onto the ground for the ancestors, then taking a sip before passing it on. Everyone gave me strong eye contact when my turn came. Everyone except Agibota. He didn’t seem hostile, just cool and reserved, still perhaps a little unsure about me; unsure about this whole enterprise. Who could blame him? My sudden appearance among them, and the way in which it had occurred was a big thing for people here to make peace with and fully comprehend.

In general, the history of African American outreach to Africa and Africans has a very checkered past, though not without its highlights: the good feelings, the sense of unity, the pride and optimism generated during the high water marks of Pan-Africanism; the way in which the American struggles for civil rights and the African struggles for independence inspired one another. Yet for a long time, the racist poison internalized during slavery and its lengthy afterlife had the effect of leading a great many African Americans to reject association with anything African. But once great numbers of black people throughout the entire African diaspora experienced, in the fifties and sixties, a new awakening of pride in African heritage – a longing to connect with the continent in meaningful ways – that pride awakened with a vengeance. The descendants of African slaves were driven by a deep longing to break through the historical fetters of the slave past and connect with an African identity before slavery. But most who tried to satisfy that longing by making the pilgrimage to Africa, found that the history they had come to seek was still bound by the shackles of slavery, even there. They’d found that once they had toured the slave forts of Ghana and Senegal, the heritage trail had hit a dead end. There were no signposts for pilgrims to point the way from there back to the ancestral village.

Now that DNA matching holds out to African Americans the tantalizing possibility of connecting with Africans who are at least our distant blood kin, that sense of longing has a very personal dimension. What would it mean – socially, culturally, politically – if hundreds and then thousands of us eventually make this journey and begin to reconnect in significant ways with members of the families our ancestors had been forced to leave behind? Even in this post Pan-African era, Africans clearly see the potential for the continent if African Americans were to “come home,” literally or figuratively, and put their shoulders to the wheel in order to help accelerate the pace of development. They understand full well how an energetic and focused African/African American collaboration in business, education, science, and the arts could prove a powerful dynamo for the uplift of our peoples on both sides of the Atlantic; a positive and hopeful development for the rest of the world as well.

But for now, Africans see us coming and cringe. Too many of us have come with heads full of romantic notions, expecting to feel instantly at home and unconditionally embraced. Others come with paternalistic ideas about what Africans want or need. Our assistance might be nice, but… will we be more trouble than we’re worth? Perhaps much more? What do we really want? What, specifically, do we want from them? Is there any evidence of an African longing for a connection to us? On what basis might we begin to construct a shared narrative which expresses an authentically mutual need for each other?

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Ruins of Haxormene's palace at the old family compound in Tegbi, Ghana"I Would Know You By Your Feet" - Part 3 of a six part series (expanded from 4 to 6 parts)Woezor (welcome)! If this is your first visit to this site, I invite you to scroll all the way back to the beginning to see how I arrived at the moment I've been describing with this particular series of posts.

At the point where I left off last time, Cousin Gideon and me had just arrived at the family's ancestral village of Tegbi, just west of Keta, near the border with Togo. Madame Desawu, caretaker of the old family compound, had just given me a warm greeting.

Her words moved me deeply. When she saw that my eyes had welled up as full of tears as her own, she walked over and pressed my face between her hands. They were rough, calloused, country woman's hands, but somehow, as soft and comforting as a warm blanket on a cold night. Then, she abruptly wheeled about and returned to her cooking in the outdoor kitchen where we'd found her when we first entered. Gideon, Kwaku and I sat nearby under the courtyard’s nearly two hundred year old mango trees to await the arrival of the full delegation from the Tovie clan.

While we waited, Kwaku peppered me with questions about my life and family in the States. The smell of Madame Desawu’s food on the fire, redolent with just enough vaguely recognizable notes to summon memories of long ago summers in the country with my southern relatives, the squeals of the children at play, the casual wandering of the odd farm animal across the courtyard here or there, and the warm conversation, all worked to make this entire scene very comfortable and familiar. All my earlier apprehensions about the day had melted away. In fact, I found myself feeling more relaxed and content than I had in many months. I had expected my first meeting with these long-missing relatives to be complicated with at least a few jarring notes of culture shock. But so far, this had felt like the afternoons I used to spend on summer vacation in North Carolina, out “pop calling” with my father or my grandmother, visiting far-flung relatives we hadn’t seen for a while. We’d turn up some long driveway and one of them would say, “Well, this is Althea and Robert’s place, David. You remember Althea and her children, don’t you?” There’d be a pretty good chance that no, I didn’t remember any of them at all. But that never mattered. They were family, something that always interested me, so I’d usually end up enjoying myself. And the food was always good.

As the men who had greeted us at the gate returned with their wives and the other clan members who’d been asked to come, it was pretty easy to guess who among them were thinking of our relationship on the basis of this narrative, and who among them might be steeling themselves to deal with me from another, less comfortable one. Unlike the people who were beaming at me, or simply trying to get a good look at me without seeming to stare, the clan members preparing themselves to deal with me from this other narrative looked sober and grim, because they knew this second narrative requires confronting slavery – always a difficult subject for Africans and African Americans. Our ancestors’ lives were viciously savaged by the same prolonged, almost incomprehensively brutal holocaust, but in the midst of that evil time, our stories diverged. My ancestors were among the twelve million souls who were its victims, murdered or carried away as slaves. Their ancestors were among the millions who found a way to ride out the storm and survive. One of the strategies the Ewes used to survive that time was to become major players in the slave trade themselves. Like the Yoruba-speaking Oyo Empire to the east of them and the Ashantis to the west, they raided other communities in order to capture slaves whom they could trade for guns and powder, which were then put to use to capture more slaves, and to prevent their own people from being captured by others. The ancestors of the people gathered around me now had been successfully protected by this Ewe community from capture. Mine hadn’t. Why?

The subtle tension rising between us around that circle in the courtyard was due to the fact that both I and these clan elders knew that I would have some questions about this that they couldn’t answer… or would rather not. One reason for the inability or reluctance to do so is the history of the malevolent and dehumanizing ways in which the slave trade lured Africans to victimize their own. The most familiar image of “the trade” is of slavery on the wholesale level, where kings and generals and strongmen devastated whole communities, afterwards selling the farmers and soldiers of the losing side with their wives and children to the Europeans, perhaps keeping some slaves for themselves. Much less familiar is the gut-wrenching reality of slavery on the retail level – the cold-blooded and tragic choices made by ordinary commoners to sell away their own kith and kin. Poor families who became desperate enough might sell off a child or two so that they could better manage to feed the ones who remained. A man might lose a son or daughter, seized to settle a debt he couldn’t pay. Chiefs sentenced some criminals to captivity as punishment. And so it went, decade after decade for hundreds of years. If the reason for my Ewe ancestor’s captivity had a story like this behind it, it was easy to understand how this was the kind that might survive as a dirty little family secret for a couple of generations, eventually to be lost completely. These aren’t the kinds of stories that people tend to cherish and commit to passing down for posterity.

But I also knew there was another over-arching reason the elders might not be able to answer many questions about my ancestor. For generations, not just in this village but throughout the continent, the transatlantic slave trade and the people who went missing because of it simply haven’t been very much on African minds. This is because the African narrative about slavery is so different from the African American narrative. Their narrative is about survival, resistance and triumph, first over slavery and then over colonialism. It’s also a celebration of deep cultural roots and continuity. The narrative I inherited about slavery celebrates survival too – and the courage and faith required to achieve it. But mine is also a narrative about the loss of deep cultural roots and continuity, about feeling, “like a motherless child, a long way from home.” These Ewes have a heritage of songs and stories which celebrate the history of their resistance and its heroes that are widely known and frequently sung. I was told that there are also songs which tell of and mourn some of those who went missing during slavery, but no one gathered that day knew any of these, nor could they think, at that moment, of anyone who did. Elders in far-flung villages who might be able to sing us these songs or tell us these stories are being lost to us, one by one and two by two with every passing year. I was promised that they will ask around until they find someone. Essentially, they were saying, “We’ll get back to you on that.”

Saturday, September 06, 2008

photo: The "Groovy Spot", Tegbi

Part 2 of a Four Part Series, "I Would Know You by Your Feet"

Woezor (welcome)! If this is your first visit to this blog, I invite you to scroll all the way back to the beginning in order to pick the story up where it begins. At the point where I left off last time, Cousin Gideon Agebemabiese and me had stopped on the way to the ancestral village at Tegbi to purchase two bottles of schnapps as gifts for the elders. These would be used to perform ablutions meant to honor the ancestors and ask their blessings on the occasion of our reunion.

Every once in a while, there’d be just enough of an opening through the trees and the underbrush to allow us a glimpse of the vast Keta Lagoon, which is the great, defining natural feature of Anlo-Ewe country. Many of Anlo’s most important towns are sandwiched in between the lagoon and the sea, spread across a long spit of land that grows narrower and narrower as you travel east until, near Keta, both the lagoon on the one side and the sea on the other, are each only a stone’s throw away. Its shallow, brackish water was too hard for heavy war canoes to navigate, so it became a safe haven to which people fled during the slave trade. Its islands became densely packed homes for many thousands. We could see dozens of their descendants fishing its waters from small boats or working their fishing nets as they waded the sandy shallows. Residents know the pathways from island to island through the shallows very well. At low tide, you can see them trudging home with the day’s catch or with sundries from the market balanced on their heads, giving the impression, from a distance, that this is a place where the people have mastered the secret of walking on water.

Just outside the gate of the old family compound in the heart of the village of Tegbi, there's a small, family-owned liquor store/snack bar called, "The Groovy Spot." As soon as Gideon pulled the truck up next to it, several clan members suddenly appeared and crossed the road to greet us. We alighted from the truck and Gideon swung into high gear, working the group like a politician, managing the introductions in both English and Ewe as we walked together to the compound gate. There to greet us were the chief’s secretary, Agibota, in his black leather cowboy hat, and a small delegation of respected elders, led by Mr. Dzisam. Youngsters Kofi and Kwaku opened the gate for us and we were ushered through it into the compound. "We have heard of you, Cousin, and we are very glad to meet you," said Mr. Dzisam. "We welcome you home." Madame Desawu, a distant cousin who has been caretaker of the place for many years, rose from her cooking in the big outdoor kitchen and approached so that we could be introduced to her as well. Following shyly in her wake came her daughter, Agnes, and Agnes’ young children.

Photo: Cousin Gideon with Madame Desawu and her daughter, Agnes at the old

family compound

"It's Like a Miracle"Our escorts spoke with one another in Ewe for a moment, and then excused themselves, saying they'd be back in a few minutes. Agnes’ children peered at me from behind their mother’s long skirt and giggled. Madame Desawu spoke animatedly with Gideon in Ewe while I had a look around. I’d been warned that the old family palace built by Gideon and Lawrence’s grandfather George (Haxormene I), was in a complete state of ruin, but I wasn’t prepared for the degree of ruin in which I found it. It looked almost as if it had barely survived wartime damage from bombs or shelling. But it was only time and neglect which had done the damage – time as measured by the relentless pace of ruin in the tropics. The neglect was due to the fact that once George’s son, family patriarch John Kofi Agbemabiese, moved his large family away to Kumasi and Accra in order to be close to his growing business interests, there were no more direct descendants of that line left in Tegbi to occupy either the palace compound or the stool of chieftancy.

photo: Ruins of Haxormene's palace

A building made of unadorned stone might last here, but there was little native stone to be had. A building made after the European style – with materials and a design originally meant for a temperate climate – simply won’t survive a tropical seacoast locale for long without constant up keep. The cycle of dry and wet seasons, each of them hot, conspires every hour of every day, year in and year out, to rot everything beneath the sun away, most especially anything built by human hands. The salt air makes it hard to keep even a coat of paint looking fresh for more than a year or two. Still, the old palace’s advanced state of decay made it hard to believe it was built only a little more than a hundred years ago.

It took a lot of imagining, but I began to see, as I poked around the place, how truly grand it once had been. It had eight bedrooms and two indoor baths at a time when these were rare anywhere on the continent. Its historical significance is that when it was built in about 1902, it was the first “story” building – simply meaning a building more than one story in height – ever built in this whole region of West Africa by a black man for himself. During the entire first half of the twentieth century, any other building of this size would have been built as a colonial administrative office of some sort, or as the headquarters for a European owned business concern. They say that for years after it was built, the sheer audaciousness of the project drew people from a hundred miles around just to see it.

While I explored and took photos, Kwaku, Agnes and a couple of others helped get white plastic chairs set up in the center of the compound courtyard for everyone who was expected. Madame Desawu chatted excitedly with Gideon as they traded family news and passed along greetings from people spread far and wide who’d passed along their regrets that they couldn’t be with us this day, but who wanted to say they were with us in spirit. Many times, she paused in the middle of her rapid fire conversation with Gideon in Ewe, looked over at me and smiled. Every time she did, I heard the same refrain. “She keeps saying, ‘It's like a miracle,’ said Gideon. ‘She says she took one look at you, and she was sure it’s true you are one of us. ‘Oh, it’s like a miracle’, she says.”

Friday, August 29, 2008

photo: Old fishing boat on the beach at Tegbi, Ghana

This entry is Part 1 of a Four Part Series

Woezor (welcome)! If this is your fist visit to this blog, please consider scrolling all the way back through these posts so you can pick the story up at the beginning. If you're a return visitor, please look around. I've been active again after a long break, and there may well be many new posts since you were last here.

Visitors who've been around lately know that I am serializing the book I am writing, "In Search of My Father's House," on these pages. This week, I begin sharing sections of the chapter, "I Would Know You by Your Feet." Thanks for visiting. Enjoy.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------“I Would Know You by Your Feet”

“It’s Like a Miracle”The highway east from Accra to the river crossing at Sagakofe had been the best stretch of main road that Gideon and I had traveled since I’d arrived in Ghana. Less than two hours after escaping the insane traffic of the capital, we were crossing the Volta River into the family’s ancestral home country of Anlo.

Not many years ago, there was a ferry at the place where the bridge now stands, and that was the only way across for many miles. This was true even back in the days when Keta, a few miles to the east near the border with Togo, was a major port. During the days of the slave trade, when this stretch of river was deeper, slave ships used to lie at anchor just south of here in the delta. On this particular afternoon, a few fishermen in dugout canoes were the only river traffic, but during the dark days of “the trade” slaving ships in the delta would be lying in wait for dugouts like these and larger war canoes to come downriver bearing cargoes of slaves from the interior. The Volta wasn’t the first African river to serve as a water highway for the transport of slaves, but it does have the dubious distinction of being the last. The very last ship known to have carried a cargo of slaves from Africa to the Americas, possibly within site of this bridge, weighed anchor for Brazil from here in 1866.

From Sagakofe to the Togolese border, the road narrows and its quality isn’t quite as high, but compared to the roads on our trip west during the week before, it was still easy going – much like traveling a typical two-lane blacktop “blue highway” in the U.S. We veered south to connect with the road that carries travelers east along the coast through Srogboe, and Anloga, the regional capital; then through Woe and Keta and finally, Denu and Aflao, the last two towns before the border. The big “Ghana National Investment Bank” logo on Gideon’s truck had the desired effect, and we were waved through every police check point with a nod or sometimes a salute and a smile, without even having to slow down. We were getting close now. The butterflies I had begun to feel when we crossed the Volta soon morphed into a whole torrent of butterflies. I’d never experienced exactly this kind of “nerves” before. This must be, I thought, like the butterflies the groom in an arranged marriage might feel before meeting his prospective bride and her family for the first time. There’s so much riding on that first impression… for all concerned. Will we feel like we fit hand in glove, or will we somehow feel just all wrong together? When we first look into one another’s eyes, will we see a glimmer of mutual recognition there – enough to recognize one another as family in any real way – or will we see… nothing? Or worse yet, will we feel repelled, or simply disappointed; sorry that we’d gone through all the trouble to arrange this meeting in the first place?

I knew Gideon was nervous too. Relations between the Agbemabieses, their close allies, and the rest of the Tovie clan had thawed some over the last couple of years. And there’d been a generally warm and positive reception to the news of my coming. But still, as Gideon had said on our journey here, even though he’d been back and forth between Accra and the village a few times, it had been twenty years since he had actually spent a night there. The process of fence-mending after a long time away is always awkward and complicated at best. Figuring out where and how my own agenda might comfortably fit into the mix could be like tip-toeing through a minefield, given the complexity of Ewe social etiquette – especially when my first introduction to the culture would come at the very same moment as my first introduction to the people who would be my hosts.

But neither Gideon nor I felt like talking about any of it now. In fact, this was the longest stretch of silence that there had been between us during the entire trip. The silence didn’t break until we arrived in Woe, the last town before Tegbi, a stop where we had to take care of a piece of business which turned out to be an important preliminary part of the social etiquette I needed to learn. Half-way through town, Gideon slowed to look carefully down every side road until he spied what he was searching for: a little liquor store at a dusty crossroads. Gideon explained that I should give him a little cash now so that he could buy two bottles of schnapps as gifts for the elders: one for the clan elders at the old family compound, and one for Uncle Wakachie. Because of the feud over the land, Wakachie wouldn’t be welcome at the compound, so we’d have to visit him separately. We’d meet with the clan elders today, Friday, and pay our respects to Wakachie on Sunday. In the old days before colonialism, libations to the ancestors would have been made with home-brewed palm wine, but during the time when this area had been part of German Togoland, it had become fashionable to use store-bought schnapps for this purpose instead, and the tradition stuck.

The liquor store was shabby and dark and felt a little dangerous. As we rolled through the crossroads and up to the door, I was surprised to feel the internal radar that most urban dwellers learn to develop suddenly swing into high alert. It was the first time since I’d been in Ghana that I’d felt the least bit unsafe. It was jarring. We were only a quarter of a mile off the main road at most, but now, suddenly this. One minute, we’d been in the middle of a bucolic, tropical countryside scene from a picture postcard, the next, right in the middle of a place that felt like the hardest, most hopeless corner of the hardest neighborhood into which I’ve ever stumbled.

The bank vehicle and Gideon’s obviously foreign passenger quickly drew a curious crowd. My inclination was just to get out, wade through them and go with Gideon into the liquor store, but he asked me to lock the doors and stay put. I did as I was asked and watched him disappear inside. A few more neighbors shuffled down the street and joined the people crowded around the truck. It’s hard to be the object of that much attention, especially when you are truly not looking for any. If people somewhere stare at you when you walk by, no matter how uncomfortable certain stares may make you feel, that’s a different thing because you know it’s soon over. All I could do was relax, make eye contact with a few folks and nod. A few people nodded back and waved or smiled. There was nothing malevolent in their stares; just curiosity. I understood. It was a slow afternoon in a slow, hard-bitten little town, and the two strangers in the official looking government truck were, quite simply, the only show in town just now.

Soon enough, Gideon emerged with the two bottles, wrapped in the ubiquitous black plastic bags which comprise half the litter in Ghana. When the wind blows hard in Ghana, because the flora is tropical, very few leaves, other than a few fronds of palm, will come flying at your face along with all that red dust. What you will get is shredded bits of black plastic bag on your clothes, in your face, in your mouth and in your eye if you’re not careful. I slipped the bottles into my backpack, and we were off.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Part 1 of 4 part seriesPlease join me again next week as I continue on with this account of what happened as Gideon and I made our way to the ancestral village, only a few miles to the east.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Woezor (welcome)! If this is your first visit, I invite you to scroll all the way back to the beginning to find out how this adventure began. If you're return visitor, welcome back. After a long time away from the blog, you can see that I've been working hard on adding new posts on a more regular basis!

As promised, I've begun to publish on these pages some substantial portions of the book I've been writing about finding and reconnecting with some of the descendants of the African family that the founder of my father's line had to leave behind when he was captured and brought to America during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The previous post talked about how different the African narrative about slavery is from the African American narrative...------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Up north where we now were, that narrative was about how scattered groups of people, tired of being victimized by slave traders, banded together and fled, or stood together and resisted, until finally, the threat of being captured was over, and they emerged from this long, dark time, victorious, proud and free.

There are songs and celebratory dances to commemorate their stands against notorious and fearsome raiders like Samory Turi. But there are no songs or dances in memory of those who were carried away into captivity. At least nobody I met could tell me of any. The stories of the disappeared, are, for these descendants of those who managed to escape that fate, stories of loss and defeat. These are tragic stories that happened to other people. And those other people and their descendants are, quite simply… gone.

After dark, if a woman in some tiny village feels afraid to venture out to the pump at night for water, because most nights when she does, she can’t shake the feeling that there’s someone walking beside her, a dark, mournful presence on the periphery of her vision; if the dogs begin to bark and howl because they sense someone close by, even if, past the dying embers of the evening’s fires, they can’t see it or smell it, and if their baleful crying makes a man turn over in the night and look, just in case, to see if his heavy walking stick is within easy reach; perhaps that’s as close to the long-missing ones that the people up here ever get.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------That's the end of the chapter, "Into the North." Next week, I'll begin publishing chapter six, which is entitled, "I Would Know You By Your Feet." It deals with what happened on my first visit to the ancestral village, and how the clan elders gathered to meet me that day officially confirmed me as their long-lost kinsman.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Photo (Amahl Grant): Kid outside Mosque at Larabanga

Woezor (welcome)! If this is your very first visit, I invite you to scroll all the way back to the beginning so that you can follow along with this journey from its start. Two years ago, through a DNA match, we found and connected with some of the missing African kin from whom my father's line had been separated by the trans-Atlantic slave trade! This is the story of how that happened, and what has been happening since.

One result of this adventure is the post you are about to read, which is an excerpt from the book I am now writing about the experience, tentatively titled, "In Search of My Father's House." Be on the lookout for it. In the meantime, however you found your way here, thanks for joining me on this journey thus far.

In the previous posting, I wrote about how difficult it usually is to talk with either Africans or people of western European descent about the history and the legacy of slavery. This new posting picks up where the previous post left off, as I traveled into Ghana's Muslim north on an STC bus, having this very conversation with a couple of my Ghanaian fellow travelers.

The man in the seat next to her jumped in, “Well, you know, yes, there were many here who once held slaves, and even some who participated in the trade that sold some of your ancestors away, but we are your brothers because we were victims too. Oh, yes, you know it’s the Ashantis and many others who did the greatest evil by far. By far.”

I nodded. Yes, I knew. But I also knew what I’m reasonably sure he knew: the extent to which northern kingdoms like Gonja, which our bus was now entering, were heavily complicit in the transatlantic trade as well. It was an exchange that sparked another vivid memory from childhood. I’d been out fishing for crab with my grandmother, Addie, on vacation in the North Carolina tidewater region. We’d stopped at a farmer’s roadside stand to buy some honey when two white-bearded men, one in his sixties and the other in his eighties, emerged from a trail at the bottom of a wooded hill across the road and approached us. The older man was grizzled and raggedy, and had the wildest look about him, certainly the wildest eyes, I had ever seen. He scared me a little. But it was me he really wanted to talk to; me to whom he had something it seemed he needed to say.

My grandmother sensed my alarm and she pulled me next to her as he came closer. His fierce eyes burned a hole right through me as he spoke urgently in a language I could not understand. The other man, who must have been his son, spoke with the thickest Scottish brogue I had ever heard, even in this region where the local accent is flavored with a decidedly Gaelic lilt. “Don’t be scared son. He means no harm. The old man, ever since he turned eighty, he just stopped speaking English. Refuses to speak it anymore. He’ll only speak Gaelic now.” The ancient one spoke to me again; something sober and sad. “The old man, he wants you to know – that slavery, you know – that were a terrible, terrible thing, that. And he’s saying, he wants you to know… it weren’t us what done that to you, you know? That were the fookin’ Brits!”

I surely appreciated the obviously sincere anti-slavery sentiment, but even at the age of eleven, I knew better. I knew that the Grants who had owned my father’s people in North Carolina, and after whom my family took our last name, were immigrants from the Scottish lowlands. I’d seen photos of the huge, triumphant Klan rally of thousands that had once marched down Washington D.C.’s Pennsylvania Avenue in the nineteen twenties, a corps of what must have been over a hundred pipers dressed in highland kilts at the fore. The photo had, for me, a chilling resonance with a photo I’d seen in Life Magazine of German troops marching triumphantly into Paris during the midst of World War Two. And as a serious young Civil War buff, I knew about the cherished southern conceit that liked to link the cause of secession with the struggle for Scottish freedom from English tyranny during the days of the great patriot hero, William Wallace. In this skewed view of history, the south was Scotland and the north represented the cruel English oppressors.

Most of the conversations I’ve ever had with white southerners about slavery have eventually devolved into defensive protestations about how it really wasn’t all that bad; that its alleged horrors may have had a germ of truth to them – in some places – but that the worst of the reported depredations were mostly Yankee propaganda, and so forth and so on. And occasionally, I’d hear acclamations not unlike the one I heard that hot, long-ago day in North Carolina; like I had just heard from the African man on this bus that, “Well, yes, we certainly had slavery around here, but if you want to be mad at somebody about it, be mad at those other bastards on down the road. ‘Cause if you’re looking for the real villains, the real evil ones, that’s who you want, not us.”

Our conversation petered out without resolution. But I can’t say it ended without any greater understanding on either side, because, speaking strictly for me, I think I did come out of it with a more sympathetic understanding of how this issue looks to them. Because as I had already learned earlier on this trip, Africans have a whole other set of narratives going when it comes to slavery.

Sunday, July 06, 2008

photo: Wild flower on the trail at Mole National Park, northern Ghana

If this is your first ever visit to this blog, woezor (welcome)! If you're a return visitor, welcome back. This week's entry is the continuation of the chapter, "Into the North" from the book on which I'm working, tentatively titled, "In Search of My Father's House: the story of how one African American family is uncovering its pre-slavery roots and reclaiming its long-lost African kin from the Great TransAtlantic Lost & Found." Next week, I'll finish this chapter and we'll begin another, so be sure to keep coming back!_________________________________________________________

Arguably, no region in West Africa is more haunted by the ghosts of its slave trade past than the northern and eastern areas that begin a couple of hundred miles inland from the coasts. Farther south, the losing soldiers in the constant battles between the great nation states might be sold as slaves, or the youngest children of families fallen on hard times who suddenly found themselves with too many mouths to feed, or, perhaps, the children of people too poor to pay their debts. This was how southerners sold their own people away into slavery. But up north where David and I and our fellow passengers on the STC bus now were, and deeper on into Africa’s interior, like southeastern Chad or the Congo, whole villages; whole clusters of villages, were swept up into slavery, their inhabitants chained together in long coffles and force-marched hundreds of miles to the sea. And much of this destruction was wrought by northerners upon themselves. The powerful empires to the south demanded an annual “gift” of slaves as tribute from vassal states. So, in order to fulfill this annual quota, on top of their own internal desire for slaves to serve the households and raise the crops of the wealthy, less powerful northern kingdoms went in search of victims too, raiding towns and villages in their own region for slaves – and it’s in this region where the most visible scars can still be seen, if you train your eyes to see.

Up north, the baobab is the tree of life. It is shelter, and a natural storage depot for water, as well as the source of a hundred different useful things: wood; strong rope; food; seasoning; medicine; beer… many, many things. A tree can live for two thousand years or more. Their symbiotic relationship with humans is such that if you spot a cluster of them where there is no village, it’s a pretty safe bet that there once was a village on that site, especially if you also find shea and fig trees close by. I had learned when the clan elders took me on a tour of the ancestral village at Tegbi, that if you find a shallow depression in the ground where there’s no obvious natural reason for one, that’s almost certainly the site of an old well.

Once I really started looking for them, these echoes of the past began to make themselves quite plain. Here, close to the road, is a living village with goats and children running about; and women pounding the northern version of fufu or doing the wash. But just a bit farther back is a ghost village: a couple of lone baobab; a couple of shea and some withered fig trees; a circular depression here or there where a well might once have been. Maybe some of these villages were abandoned because a well ran dry, maybe some of the villagers who had once lived here managed to escape the invaders and find safety in numbers somewhere else. But knowing the history of this area, I felt certain that many of the people who once lived here were among the millions marched to the sea, never to see home again.

The woman across the aisle from me, one of the friendly neighbors who had offered me food and conversation on this trip, noticed my grave expression and the tears in my eyes. “What’s wrong, brother?” Cousin David was napping. Quietly, I tried to explain, but I could tell from her expression that my words weren’t connecting.

Her query suddenly took me back to a moment in my childhood when her role and mine were reversed. I’d been traveling by train from my hometown of Washington, D.C. to visit my paternal grandparents in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. I was seated next to a German tourist visiting the south for the first time. He was an interesting man, and talkative, and I’d enjoyed his conversation, but during the last couple of hours before our arrival in Rocky Mount, he’d suddenly grown very quiet and pensive as he looked out the window – sad, it seemed to me, about something. After a long while, I’d summoned the courage to ask him why. “These people, they really had it hard down here during the war, and after, didn’t they? They really suffered.” His voice had cracked with emotion, and I was taken aback by it. “War? What war?” And then it dawned on me. “Oh, man, is he talking about the Civil War? Can’t be.” But yes, he was. As a teen-ager, he and some of his family had survived the bombing of Dresden - had lived through the difficult aftermath of the war. And the experience of surviving the war had, of course, forever changed his way of looking at the world. One thing that war had changed was his way of looking at and reading a landscape. And as he surveyed the countryside we could see from the train, his eyes could clearly see, nearly a hundred years on, what the southerners in this immediate area had lost - the price they had paid for their bid at secession. As a kid who loved history, I was more than willing to let him teach me to see these things through his eyes – not as perfectly, to be sure, because I’ve never myself lived through the experience of war – but enough to begin to understand.

It’s hard enough to train your eye as an observer to see with clarity what’s right before your eyes; harder still to learn to see what’s not there; to know what should be there; what once probably was there in a certain place, but now is gone. That’s why, as my neighbor across the aisle asked me to explain what I was seeing out the window that moved me so, it was hard to make myself plain. But even without this complex dimension, the conversation would eventually have become difficult and then stalled, because as I had already learned from my earliest days in Ghana, it’s as hard to have a conversation with many Africans about slavery as it is to talk about the subject with many American whites, especially southerners. The phenomenon is certainly easy enough to understand. Nobody likes to start a conversation they’re reasonably sure will leave them feeling bad by the time it’s over: 1)defensive or angry; 2)put-upon and misunderstood; 3)offended; 4)personally, and therefore, unjustly accused; 5)guilty, or 6)some combination of all the above.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------